More PSN downtime shuts off online play for 13 hours

The start of a new month for Sony and their PlayStation 3 system usually only means one thing – more mind boggling maintenance. The company has just announced a new 13 hour outage for all PS3 users and unlike other maintenance periods, you won’t be allowed to play a single game online.

Unfortunately, just like the other maintenance periods before it there doesn’t appear to be a reasonable explanation either. Maintenance is unavoidable sometimes everybody understands that, but when it occurs at such a frequent rate as PS3 users have experienced, eyebrows are naturally going to be raised.

According to the official Sony US Blog, the downtime will take place on Monday April 16th at around 6am Pacific time, 9am Eastern Time and 2pm over in the UK. Those of you who are playing in Asia will suffer the worse as the outage will happen just as you are finishing work no doubt – 9pm for Japan and 8pm for Hong Kong users, nasty.

This is as heavy as outages goes for Sony too, as they have stated that users will not be able to access ”Account Management, the PSN store, PlayStation Home or play online”. We love how they kept the online gaming part until last, even though it’s obviously the most important factor of any maintenance. Usually gamers would be able to game online as long as they stayed logged in during a maintenance window, but that isn’t the case here sadly.

With that said and done, lets hope that this is the only maintenance period we see in April. We’re guessing that the inevitable comments are going to come that it’s no big deal, but with no explanation time and time again some users may have a right to question Sony on their motives.

Will the maintenance period affect you on Monday? What are your opinions on Sony’s lack of explanation regarding the frequent outages?